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Do 4.2 Million Children Really Need Ritalin?
In 2011, Dr. Sanford Newmark posed an important question: Do 2.5 million children really need Ritalin? Nearly 3 years later, the number of children taking Ritalin has risen to 4.2 million. Dr. Newmark, head of the Pediatric Integrative Neurodevelopmental Program at UCSF, specializes in the integrative and holistic treatment of children with autism and ADHD. […]
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On Our Mind – Alzheimer’s Disease
An estimated 5 million Americans have Alzheimer’s disease and that number will continue to rise. The impact will be felt not just in the homes of the diagnosed but by their caregivers, their loved ones, their communities, and beyond. The Brain Channel’s flagship series On Our Mind is endeavoring in the next few months to […]
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Ethicists Confront Cancer: When the Professional Becomes Personal
In 2006, when Rebecca Dresser was diagnosed with oral cancer, her life was thrown off-balance. As a professor of law and biomedical ethics, she had been teaching and writing for years about the complex ethical, moral, and medical challenges of dealing with life-threatening diseases such as cancer. Yet she found herself personally unprepared for the […]
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Global Health Day 2014
“Teach for California, Research for the World!” UC President Janet Napolitano neatly summarized what was on display all day at the 2014 UC Global Health Day at UC Davis. With enlightening talks on how breakthroughs happen, new strategies for disease control, and inspiring student-produced videos, you’ll share in the excitement and enthusiasm for what the […]
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The Pursuit of Happiness
Nearly all of us buy into what UC Riverside psychology professor Sonja Lyubomirsky calls the myths of happiness — beliefs that certain adult achievements (marriage, kids, jobs, wealth) will make us forever happy and that certain adult failures or adversities (health problems, divorce, having little money) will make us forever unhappy. In this presentation for […]
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Health Reform at the Crossroads
Democrats and Republicans have been working to create laws that reform the American health care system for decades. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, also known as ObamaCare, is the first successful major overhaul of health care since Medicare in 1965. The Act affirms “the core principle that everybody should have some basic security […]
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Telomeres: Tiny Keys to the Fountain of Youth?
Our time is limited. The clock is ticking. If we’re fortunate enough to escape disease, accidents, or war intact, then at some point our bodies eventually turn against us. What causes our bodies to age? Why don’t we simply live on (until that proverbial anvil lands atop our unsuspecting heads)? Turns out, telomeres are one […]
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Precision Medicine – Making the Personal Possible
Keith Yamamoto, the Vice Chancellor of Research at UCSF says, “The promise of precision medicine is enormous. It’s a very aspirational, revolutionary change in the way that research and health care relate to patients and citizens.” In precision medicine, data of all types — molecular, clinical, population-based — would be continuously amassed from consenting patients […]
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Turning Cancer into a Chronic, but Controllable, Disease
Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, founder of NantWorks, describes his vision for turning cancer into a chronic but controllable disease by using advanced rapid gene sequencing, supercomputing and other methods of analysis to transcend the genome to the proteome. This approach has the potential to redefine how cancer is diagnosed and to develop therapies precisely tailored to […]
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Nutrition Labels: How Sweet It Is
Lately, the subject of added sugar in our diets has been in the news. Most recently the FDA announced the first makeover of the nutrition label since it appeared twenty years ago. One of the big changes is the requirement to note how much added sugar is in a product. The new labeling now indicates […]